John Carpenter was once an extremely talented film-maker. By the time "Starman" came along, I was convinced that there was no genre in which he could not excel. Since then, sadly, it's been a long, slow descent into mediocrity, straight THROUGH mediocrity, and into madness.<br /><br />"Ghosts of Mars" is, as many have observed, not only formulaic, but derivative of Carpenter's past (and far superior) films. Take the faceless hordes of "Assault on Precinct 13", crossbreed them with the possessed victims of "Prince of Darkness", add a dash of "The Thing", and there you have it. This might be forgivable if any moment of this film were as entertaining, creepy or exciting as any of those films' worst moments. Sadly, it can't even attain the level of "They Live".<br /><br />Has Carpenter forgotten even the most rudimentary skills involved in telling a coherent story? It certainly seems so. We're given flashbacks within flashbacks until we are literally three levels deep. This is just plain incompetent. The characters display almost no personality traits that aren't repetetive and annoying, and their motivations are almost nonexistent. Their plan for defeating the hordes is lamebrained in its best moment, as they've not been given enough information to even have a clue whether it will have any effect at all.<br /><br />Perhaps most disturbing is an almost aryan approach to the casting. Only one member of the cop party is not white, and our main character, Natasha Henstridge, is as white as a human can get while retaining life. The criminals, on the other hand, are, to a man, people of color. Particularly discomforting is a scene in which Henstridge twists the arm of a black man, demanding that he say that she's in charge. Did no one stop to question this aspect of the production even once?<br /><br />In the end, though, racism is a minor point, since everything else has been mishandled to such a spectacular degree. I would love to see the Carpenter who gave us "Halloween" and "Big Trouble in Little China" return to film-making, and put the pretender who currently uses his name in his place.